The problem with Patch is a pretty classic one: it has too many employees (~1,500) working on a product that doesn't get enough attention from consumers and, therefore, advertisers trying to reach consumers.

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The view from the inside is that this boat has become a fish-tank. They kept telling us that we would be able to sell all of the Aol properties. That was over a year ago. I signed up to become a local aol sales rep. This was supposed to be just the start. Instead I have a total BS product. Ads that aren't trafficked properly or on time. They had me selling websites for 3 months to advertisers and then shut down the product. I am lucky if our deals product sells 5 in a week across our region and all of my local editors have quit or are job hunting.

To make it worst my Regional Publisher (that is a patchism for sales manager) has turned into a total jerk and is asking for weekly call reports and seems totally unsympathetic to the fact that that some of my ads were just trafficked to patches in the wrong state. Finally I just applied to a job and got a call back from the HR guy saying he had 9 patch resumes... BI hire me and I will give you a scoop of a lifetime... e-mail in the post.